So it's not like they are "watering down" anything and not requiring incoming students to know these subjects. They're just trying to accomodate the (suprisingly large to me) number of students who had no viable route to getting those classes in high-school.
I am from Washington state. I was admitted to Caltech in 1968. In those days, we all had to take the SAT. The Dean of Students told me my math SAT score was lower than they liked to see, but they admitted me anyway. In my class there were two students from Washington state. I recall there were also two students from Washington state in the classes preceding and following mine.
I graduated from Caletch in 1972 with good grades, went on to graduate school and a rewarding career in science and engineering.
[edit] I just reread Bostonian's comment above. I should emphasize that I didn't get the impression from the Dean that Caltech felt it was "devaluing academic measures" by admitting me. There are lots of academic measures besides the SAT. The Caltech faculty and administration understood this 55 years ago.
For example, for high school roughly 20 years ago in Sacramento, California I went to an independent study charter school where I met with a teacher roughly once a week and did my assignments primarily from home. My parents sent me to this school as an alternative to the low-performing, rather violent high school that I was assigned to attend. At the time I was a student there, there was no chemistry course offered (though biology was offered, and during my senior year physics was offered), but most of the universities I was interested in required a year of chemistry. I had two options: (1) take chemistry at another high school or (2) take an equivalent chemistry course at a community college. I opted for option #2; while this course was more basic than AP Chemistry and thus was not equivalent to that course, it was equivalent to high school chemistry, and because I took it at a community college I earned both high school and college credit.
I ended up taking seven community college courses in Spanish (my high school Spanish teacher left in the middle of the school year and it was unclear whether she’d be replaced, and so I took three semesters of Spanish at community college, which credit-wise was equivalent to four years of high school Spanish), chemistry, and computer science while I was in high school. This helped me get into Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in computer science.
I think it’s a good thing when colleges recognize that not everybody goes to competitive high schools with a wide array of college-prep courses. Students in these situations have to do the best they can with the resources they have, such as taking community college courses or taking AP tests.
